


crash and burn

by sibley (ferns)



Category: Doom Patrol (Comics)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, F/M, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Mental Health Issues, Past Abuse, Suicide Attempt, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, serious discussions of suicide attempts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:56:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22237468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: A good citizen calls an ambulance after seeing a car crash into a ravine, and Cliff wakes up in a hospital in a body battered and bruised but nonetheless his, flesh and blood and bone and all, to see two people he thought he'd lost forever waiting for him.Things evolve from there.
Relationships: Cliff Steele & Dorothy Spinner, Cliff Steele & Kate Godwin
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	crash and burn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [montivagant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/montivagant/gifts).



> For Isa, who had this idea right after the first issue of Weight of the Worlds came out, even if it took me six or so months to actually get around to finishing what I wanted to do with it.
> 
> This is tagged as Gen _and_ as F/M because Kate and Cliff's relationship is pretty ambiguous, and there are some references to the fact that they obviously, um, hooked up in the past, even if it _was_ technically to save the world. Really, go either way on it-what really matters is that they're two people who love each other very much, regardless of what kind of love that is in your eyes. That level of love between everybody is the important thing here. 
> 
> [ **CW:** this work essentially revolves around a suicide attempt. It can't be skipped or divorced from the plot. This suicide attempt is the focal point of the entire fic, and it is brought up several times and takes place practically immediately before the story begins. Other past failed suicide attempts are also referenced, including Jane's near-suicide attempt in Doom Patrol vol. 2 #63, as are self-destructive tendencies that go along with it, including walking on broken bones and other unhealthy behaviors, and depersonalization/derealization. I want to stress that this cannot be extracted from the plot and it is impossible to read this fic without reading a continued discussion of it. 
> 
> This fic also contains references to past emotional and psychological abuse and manipulation from parents and parental figures as well as implications of transphobia and ableism, mainly toward Dorothy as someone with a craniofacial disorder, and unhealthy codependent relationships that aren't the focus of the work. Additionally, there are a couple of brief references to sexual situations, like how Kate got her powers from Rebis, and to past character deaths like Rita and Josh's. 
> 
> As always, if you think there's something else I should include in this box, please let me know.]

Oddly enough, Cliff’s first thought when he realizes that he’s awake and alive is _not_ about the gravity of what he just did or the fear of what might be about to happen when he wakes up or the hope that maybe the rest of the team—or, no, wait, it’s just _the team_ now, because he’s not _with_ them anymore, is he?—is there waiting for him because they heard about what happened somehow, but the realization that he’s almost definitely going to have to pay for the stolen car.

He groans and refuses to open his eyes. The world feels all fuzzy and awkward against his skin. The pain pushes through the fog a little, barely enough to make him wince. He just wants to go back to sleep and not wake up again this time.

“Hey, tough guy. You really scared us, you know?” A voice says from somewhere nearby. For a moment he doesn’t recognize it. Everything sounds distorted. But he _knows_ who just spoke. He _knows_ he knows. It just takes too long to click.

And when it does, Cliff doesn’t know whether to feel awful or relieved.

Awful, because how could he forget Kate’s voice so _fast?_ One of the few good things about his fucking life and he forgot something as simple as the sound of her voice? Relieved, because, well, to put it bluntly, since Kate is dead, hearing her means that _he’s_ dead too. And Christ, it’s not fair, but he—god, please let it have worked. It has to have worked.

But whatever the afterlife is really like, he’s pretty sure he shouldn’t feel _any_ pain, pushing through a cloud of numb nothingness or not. Though maybe it was just different for him. Most people that he knew of tried to kill themselves to stop themselves from feeling something. All the previous times he’d attempted suicide, Cliff had been trying to feel _anything._ This time it had switched back to the way it was “supposed to be.” Maybe the difference was the reason it had worked.

Cliff finally forces himself to blink his eyes open and immediately has to squint against the harsh lighting. He has to see her. He has to see her to know if this is real. He knows as well as anyone that seeing isn’t believing. But he has to see her anyway, because anyone can fake a voice, even if he was so careful to keep Kate a secret. It was selfish, of course. But Kate had been one of the few good things he’d ever had. He couldn’t have told Larry and Rita about her, because she was only ever halfway in their life, _the_ life, anyway. It would have broken something. It was a stupid reason, but it was _his_ stupid reason.

“Careful there.” Someone takes his hand. It has to be Kate, but everything is blurry, and he’s never really been able to feel her hand in his before. “You got off pretty lucky, but that’s still a broken leg, three broken ribs, and a fractured collarbone you’re feeling.”

“And the burns and all the little cuts,” another familiar voice pipes up, and Cliff doesn’t know if he’s going to be able to stop himself from crying. It’s been so long since he heard her voice. So long since he heard _either_ of them. A tiny hand pokes at his upper arm. “The doctor said you had a lot of them.”

His mouth feels like it’s filled with cotton balls and tastes like he just accidentally swallowed engine oil, but he tries to ask “Is this real?” regardless. It comes out distorted but still human. Twisted normally, not mechanically. He tries to ask again, but it catches somewhere at the back of his throat and fades out before it makes anything but a choking sound.

There are phantom wires burrowing into Cliff’s brain, the echoes of seeing—not feeling, never feeling—someone’s hand on his chest pushing him down. A whisper of _I just thought it best for us to come to an understanding before I activated your motor functions_ and _Do you believe in serendipity, Mr. Steele? You_ do _know what serendipity means, don’t you?_ that pushes its way deep down inside and makes something in him burn.

He can’t breathe. He can’t _breathe._ He tries to clench the blankets that he knows must be under him with his fingers and _can’t,_ he can’t even feel Kate’s hand in his anymore, and there’s too much making his throat burn and he thinks he might be dying for _real_ this time, unless he’s just in hell and this is his eternal punishment.

“Okay, okay, hang on, just breathe, okay? You’re fine. Everything is fine. It’s okay.” There’s Kate’s voice again, and he’s pretty sure he can identify her as one of the vaguely colorful blobs taking up the majority of his vision. “Dorothy just hit the call button. It’s okay.”

Cliff keeps trying to breathe, the burning pain on either side of his lungs getting worse with every breath he takes. Something’s _wrong,_ something’s gone wrong inside him and gone wrong outside too and he’s pretty sure he’s about to black out but he _really_ doesn’t want to because if Kate is here then he can’t risk her disappearing again and he can’t risk losing Dorothy again so he _can’t_ black out even if his body is failing inward on itself.

He blacks out regardless.

* * *

Dorothy doesn’t like hospitals.

Something about them makes her skin crawl, like there’s something she’s forgotten she didn’t like about them. It doesn’t matter what it is specifically, though, because all the little things make her stomach churn too. The smell is overwhelming and the bright lights feel like they’re burning her skin and the feel of everything there is all wrong. Her mother used to tell her that she had to take her to a lot of hospitals when she was a little baby so they could do things like surgery on her ears so she could hear and something about making it easier for her to breathe through her nose. Dorothy was always glad she couldn’t remember those trips.

The only thing that’s nice about them is that they let you watch _movies._ Even in the grown-up rooms! And they aren’t even the ones Dorothy had seen before, the really old movies her mom liked watching or the slightly newer and generally more entertaining ones that George would sometimes leave on. They were new and bright and colorful and it was easy to get lost in them and forget that the chair she was sitting in was uncomfortable and that the air tasted like chemicals and pretend that Cliff was holding her hand as tightly as she was holding his.

But the movies only do so much. Kate says Cliff will be okay, and Dorothy believes her more easily than she believes the doctors and nurses who say the same thing, but it still feels weird. She offered to make someone who could help the doctors work better, but Kate said that it was probably a good idea to pretend they didn’t have any powers so they wouldn’t get thrown out of the hospital for accidentally scaring someone. And Kate knows best, always, except for sometimes when Marion knows better, so Dorothy follows her advice and tries not to listen to closely to the things the nurses say to themselves about her or him or sometimes even about Kate when they do things like swap out the big clear bag that goes into Cliff’s arm.

The only nurse she likes is the one who called her Cliff’s daughter. She was the one who showed Dorothy how to turn the subtitles for the movie on, too, and she didn’t stare at Dorothy’s face the first time she met her, _and_ she blushed sometimes when Kate talked to her. That’s all it takes to make someone good. She thinks she’d like the nurse more if she’d met her outside of the hospital, though, because then she could’ve been like Josh, who was a doctor but without all the scary things that came with hospitals and doctor’s offices.

Dorothy’s asleep the next time Cliff wakes up, but Kate tells her everything she missed, right down to imitating the hoarse way he asked if he could please just get some water, and promises that she’ll be sure to wake her up next time, and only didn’t because she knew that Dorothy had been trying to keep herself awake so that she wouldn’t have to go out to the car and sleep with Kate and needed to finally get some real rest.

In between watching movies and taking short naps and having Kate bring her meals from the cafeteria, Dorothy talks practically nonstop to Cliff, telling him everything he’s missed even if he can’t hear her. She tells him about how something happened and turned the world upside down and for awhile she didn’t know who she was because she was back with her mom (stepmom?) on the farm and didn’t know what to do about it or how she knew things about the outside world. She tells him about the first time she made Dot and Paddle and Heart Of Ice for _fun_ and not just because she needed somebody to protect her. She tells him about when Kate showed up on her mom’s doorstep and everything just _clicked,_ and how the sting of her parents happily handing her over to someone they’d only just met had been dulled by the soothing knowledge that she was exactly where she was supposed to be for the first time since things had gone wrong.

Most of all, though, Dorothy tells him about how much she missed him. How much _both_ of them had missed him. How it had felt like there was a hole in her that she couldn’t fill because she didn’t even realize what was missing. That the first few days on the road with Kate had just been a long process of rediscovering herself and trying to figure out how all the new memories crowding her head fit into everything, and that she was pretty sure it was the same for Kate. She tells him how nice it is that he finally has a human body again, even if he was much more handsome as a robot. She tells him how excited she is for them to be able to leave the hospital. How when they finally get out, they can go look for Josh so Kate can meet him and Dorothy’s fractured family unit can start to heal again because if _she’s_ okay and _he’s_ okay and _Kate’s_ okay then Josh must be okay too.

Sometimes it almost seems like he’s about to wake up, and Dorothy stops talking and holds her breath, but nothing ever happens. That’s okay. The doctors said it was a “catastrophic car accident,” and Kate said that Cliff was really lucky not to get hurt even worse, so it’s okay if he takes some time to wake up for _real._ The only thing Dorothy doesn’t understand is why no one will tell her how he got in the accident in the first place, because the doctors say that the paramedics found his car at the bottom of a ravine after someone called 911, but that can’t be right even though Kate says she’s pretty sure that’s really what happened. Dorothy thinks it must have been a supervillain or something, though, because Cliff was supposed to be a good driver most of the time. He didn’t even hit any deer when they went to Rainbow Estates, not like her dad did when he drove anywhere.

By the time Cliff _does_ wake up and stay awake for longer than five minutes, Dorothy’s watched every kid’s movie and most of the adult ones that they offer, most of them twice. He twitches a little and she immediately pauses _Zootropolis_ so she can lean over him, holding her breath. Kate is getting them lunch, from a real place outside this time, and Dorothy is happy to not be eating the same plasticy sandwiches over and over again, but if Kate is outside then she won’t be back in time if Cliff goes back under again. She mentally adds this to a reason to ask Kate if she could get a phone. Not that she has any money to pay for it, but…

“Ow,” Cliff says, and Dorothy tries not to smile too wide because it hurts her face. It’s not exactly an interesting conversation starter, but it’s _something,_ and he actually _said it,_ even if his voice still sounds all crackly just like Kate had said it did. He squints at her and she tries not to flap her hands excitedly. “...Dorothy?”

“You remember me!” She tries not to be too loud, she really and truly tries, but he winces a little anyway. Maybe she was too excited. Kate _said_ he remembered things, but there was always a part of her that was worried things would turn out the way they did in the movies when people woke up and couldn’t remember their lives. And in the grand scheme of things, Dorothy didn’t know how memorable she really was. “Sorry.”

“S’okay.” He slowly looks her up and down. She pulls her knees up to her chest so he can see her striped leggings. Kate got them for her. They were nice. Better than the jeans her mom liked to force her to wear. “You’ve…” Cliff makes an attempt to sit up before hissing with pain and giving up, muttering out a curse that causes Dorothy to dutifully cover her own ears. “You’ve grown. Jesus, kid, you’re so big.”

Dorothy puffs up her chest. Kate says so too. She likes being taller. It makes her feel more grown-up. Like she’s getting closer to the age when she’ll be able to tell people to stop staring at her and actually make them listen. “Do you want me to call the doctors like I did last time?”

“No, that’s okay.” He closes his eyes for a second and Dorothy worries he’s going to go back to sleep. Kate says it’s _good_ for him to sleep, that he’s got a lot of healing to do and that sleeping will help him get it done, but she wants to talk to him. It feels like it’s been a decade since she last got to have a conversation with him, even if that can’t _possibly_ be right. 

“Kate will be back really soon,” she offers, hoping that will be enough to keep him awake. “She just went to get lunch, but I bet she’s already on her way back! I don’t think she brought food for you, though. When she gets back I can get you something from the cafeteria, but the food there’s not very good.”

“No, no, that’s okay.” He repeats. He _is_ hungry and thirsty, and just like the last two times he was awake his mouth feels dry and tastes terrible, but honestly he kind of feels like he might be too tired to eat. “What about everyone else?"

Dorothy blinks. “What do you mean? It’s just us, I think.” Unless he’s talking about the doctors and nurses, but she doesn’t _think_ he is. “Me and Kate are the only ones who are here.” She leans forward so she can whisper, “And the only reason we got in is because Kate did something with the computers so that it said we were your family. I hope that’s okay.”

“Yeah—yeah, of course that’s okay.” He glances toward the door to the room. Dorothy bites her lip. She _believes_ him, she does, but it doesn’t sound like it’s okay. But of course he _wants_ to see her and Kate, right? He loves her. Loves both of them. He used to say that she was terrific and the real leader of the team and that she could do anything she sets her mind to and she _knows_ he loves Kate and always has. But he still sounds upset. Maybe it’s that nobody else came?

“I bet if anyone else tried to come, they couldn’t because Kate only changed the computers to let us in,” she decides. If that’s what he’s sad about, maybe reassuring him will make him feel better. “So if anyone else wanted to get in they couldn’t because they weren’t family.”

Cliff looks back at her. He _wants_ to believe her. He really does. And he’s more than happy that her and Kate are there. But he also wants to say that if they really wanted to visit him, his family—the _rest_ of his family would’ve found a way to get in. Hell, she may not have officially worked there anymore, but hadn’t Casey at least been an EMT at a hospital that could very well have been this one? And even if she didn’t do it anymore, at one point Rita had been able to shrink, and sometimes Keeg could travel along electrical byways, and even if Jane probably couldn’t do it, Rain Brain could phase through things and Flit could teleport, and Flex could basically do magic—and while he barely knows the kid, couldn’t Lucius do it too?

If they’d wanted to get in, they could have. He _knows_ they could have. And they didn’t.

He lets Dorothy talk at him until Kate gets back with the food. It’s nice to just listen to her voice. She’s so much more talkative than she was before, he’s sure of it. She’d always been so shy, only ever talking nonstop if it was to herself, until the ritual he hadn’t been allowed to be there for, when he’d stood at the bottom of the hill, nervous that things were going wrong and there was nothing he could do about it because it was so far away. After that she’d really opened up.

Kate doesn’t say much once she sits down. She just holds his hand and nods along to what Dorothy’s saying, occasionally inserting a clarification. It’s hard for him to watch both of them at the same time, but he tries his best, and it’s a fantastic distraction from the itching under his cast, so he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want them to move. It’s easier to act like things are exactly the way they were before if he doesn’t say a word.

* * *

It’s only when Cliff gets discharged from the hospital that the worry _really_ starts to set in.

Kate pays for it, or she uses his money to pay for it since he’s got a surprising amount stored away even if he never really felt right using it because it technically was _Niles’_ and what was Niles’ could be taken away just as easily as it was given, or—something that he can’t bring himself to care about enough to follow. They give him crutches, which is good, since while he doesn’t mind walking on a broken leg since even excruciating pain is welcome it isn’t exactly _efficient._ None of that is the hard part.

What’s looming over it all is the big question of where he’s supposed to _go._

His ID said to return him to Dannyland if someone found him, but that one nurse with a crush on Kate had said disapprovingly that there _was_ no such place as Dannyland for him to be returned to when they found him (and that he should really get a new ID with the right markers on it and everything and a better picture, but Cliff hadn’t paid much attention to that, since Dannyland was not only a real place but probably the safest one on Earth). Cliff tried very hard not to let that worry him. Kate didn’t exactly have a house nearby, as her and Dorothy had been essentially living in between the hospital room and Kate’s car. Which means that their living situation is kind of fucked.

There’s kind of only one place they _can_ go to try to get some help if the rest of the group is MIA, and Cliff is positive that it’s going to be really, _really_ awkward.

“Hi, are you Sam Reynolds?” Kate asks politely. Dorothy keeps half-hiding behind her, but her grip on Cliff’s hand gets ten times tighter. Meeting new people is still difficult. “I’m Kate, Kate Godwin—do you think we could come in for a few minutes?”

Sam’s a nice guy, so he lets them in. The Reynolds house is much cozier than it was the last time Cliff was there, even though they’re still half-moved into Dannyland. He supposes it’s because Valerie’s had proper time to settle in now. He can see half a dozen of her sculptures without even turning his head—twisted effigies of some of those gods Lucius summons to talk to mixed in with practical vases and a couple of clay animals. Dorothy ventures over to pick up one of them, a cat with a tiny anarchist symbol carved into its shoulder.

“Where’s Lucius now?” He tries to sound casual, but he’s pretty sure that Sam—or at least Lucius’ grandmother, what’s her name… Eleanor?—sees right through him in two seconds. They can probably tell he _doesn’t_ want the answer to be _somewhere nearby,_ which he’s sure they’d like to tell him considering he’s their son (or their grandson) and all. 

But…if Lucius is around, then that means Dannyland is closed to him now. It means they didn’t come because they didn’t _want_ to come, not because they couldn’t for some reason or another. But even if an emergency came up… okay, Cliff doesn’t _totally_ know how long he was in the hospital for, but it was long enough that they could have been there if they wanted to. 

To be fair, he barely knows Casey when it comes down to it, as much as he’d like to. The same goes for Flex, even though he’s known him for a lot longer than he’s known Casey. And Jane is the team leader. She has to look out for everybody in the group, and like it or not, Cliff’s just not one of them anymore, she doesn’t have to keep an eye on him anymore now that there’s no obligation. He doesn’t blame her for it. He can’t. She has to keep everyone’s best interests in mind. But there’s still—there’s still—

There’s a _hole_ in him. A big sucking chasm where Larry and Rita should be. When Rita had been missing, it had felt like someone had cut out a piece of his heart. Almost as bad as it had been when he’d thought she was dead. That _both_ of them were dead. They’re _his,_ and he was—had been, maybe—theirs. There are lifetimes of memories under his wiring—under his skin, a spiraling inside that _screams_ at him that he _needs_ to find them because if he’s not there then something could be happening to them. When he’s not there bad things happen. When he _is_ there bad things happen, but at least he can do something to keep them safe. 

(Not that he’d be of any use to them like this, of course. He’d just get in the way, that’s _why_ the team doesn’t want him anymore.)

“On a trip,” Sam says, holding out his hand for Dorothy to shake now that she’s not hiding in between them. “He left a note and told us to leave out the usual stuff for him when he gets back.” He shrugs, but it looks forced. Cliff feels bad for the guy. He’s always been nice, and Cliff can remember how terrified he was when Lucius disappeared. “I try not to worry about him and I know he can take care of himself, but… you know. It’s dangerous out there.”

Kate starts asking him about houses in the area and the two of them seem to hit it off quite nicely, so Cliff awkwardly tries to avoid eye contact with Eleanor while Dorothy explores their house and, by the sound of things, finds Valerie in her art room, probably working on a new project. He can feel Eleanor keeping an eye on him all the same, though. What did Lucius say about his magic when he was explaining some of it to Casey? That it ran their family and just skipped a generation?

Cliff is so focused on thinking about that he doesn’t even notice that Kate and Sam are both watching him, too.

* * *

The apartment in the building that Sam recommended is fine. Two bedrooms and one bathroom and most importantly on the ground floor, since stairs are difficult to manage with the crutches even after he’s had some practice. Cliff assumes that he’s going to be sleeping on whatever couch they get until he voices that assumption out loud and Kate stares at him for a solid thirty seconds before saying that he got in a _very serious car accident and no way am I letting you sleep on the couch, honestly what kind of person do you think I am?_

But Cliff doesn’t want her sleeping on the couch, she doesn’t deserve that, so they resolve to get a bed that’s big enough for two people to fit comfortably without touching and give Dorothy the other room, which she’s _very_ excited about. He doesn’t think he’s seen her be upset once since she came back into his life, which is nice. It’s good to see her happy. He hasn’t told her that he’s planning on looking for Josh, at least not yet, but he’s sure she’ll be delighted to hear that the last time Cliff saw him, he was alive and well.

The first night of sleeping on a pair of air mattresses because they don’t actually have beds yet is difficult, but once everything is assembled it seems to work out well enough. Kate fusses about making sure that he’s not too uncomfortable like it even matters in the long run, and Dorothy buys a sticker pack with her three dollars worth of life savings and absolutely covers the headboard of her bed with them. During those three days of settling in and eating takeout and watching movies on Kate’s computer, it’s _almost_ like they’re normal. He can close his eyes and pretend they’re all normal people and it almost feels good enough to be real.

It’s on the fourth day after he’s released from the hospital that he notices something off about Kate.

For a minute he can’t put his finger on it. For that minute it’s enough to make his chest tight, because the feeling of something being _not quite there_ is exactly like the one he used to get about Niles’ implanted memories and he doesn’t want to think about that kind of thing because it makes him throw up. But the thing that’s off about Kate isn’t nearly as insidious as something coming from Niles. Hell, it’s practically the opposite, because for some reason she’s acting like he’s made of glass.

Kate doesn’t let him drive, which could easily be chalked up to the fact that one of his legs is broken which makes it kinda difficult to do anything in any vehicle except swear when the car goes over a bump. She doesn’t let him cut anything up, either, whether it’s with scissors or a knife or what. The pain medication that the doctor at the hospital prescribed stays with her.

It’s frustrating, because Cliff doesn’t _feel_ like he has to be wrapped in bubble wrap or whatever the hell. It’s not like the car was even the first time he tried to off himself. Probably wasn’t even the twentieth time. He’d just… never gotten so close to succeeding, that’s all.

Dorothy hasn’t picked up on it at all, thank god. She hasn’t even asked him how he crashed, which is good because Cliff doesn’t know what excuse would be good enough for her. She’s a tough cookie and a good kid, but he doesn’t know if she could handle the truth. Especially since she’s been so happy with them. He doesn’t want to ruin that for her. She shouldn’t have to deal with his shit. Neither should Kate, for that matter. It’s his baggage. He’s been handling it pretty much alone for decades now.

(But… the thing is… Kate knew basically all of his baggage once. She knew things about him that he’d never bothered to tell anybody else, and he knew things about her that he would never even think of sharing. Hell, they knew each other’s _birth names_ for fuck’s sake. That was a line he hadn’t even crossed with Rita and Larry even though between the three of them the topic had come up a few times. She’d handled that fine. 

And she had treated him like, well, a man. It’s not that nobody else _had,_ at that point everyone did, even Niles. But she had been the first to not be taken aback by his humanity. After the “accident” she had been the first to… the first to…

It had been important. She had been important. To him and to everyone else. If anybody was going to take it seriously, she would. 

Not that Larry and Rita and Jane and her people hadn’t. It had just been different. Larry and Rita felt the same in their own _different_ way, so of course they couldn’t exactly process things together. And Jane and her people, whether it was Jane herself as the host or not, always had their own things to deal with that made his seem small by comparison. That was all.)

Cliff still doesn’t want to bring it up. She deserves to decide when they’re going to talk about it. She deserves to know on her terms. It wouldn’t be fair to suddenly start talking about how useless he was now that he was human even though it was what he had wanted for so long, and in a freely transitioned body at that. It just wouldn’t be fair. Especially since Dorothy could walk in at pretty much any minute, and the walls are relatively thin. 

He doesn’t have to wait long, because it only takes until nighttime if that day, after Dorothy’s gone to bed, for her to bring it up. 

“Can we talk about this?” Kate asks, looking exhausted. “I really think we need to talk about this.”

Cliff sets down his toast as his mouth goes dry and his throat starts to feel tight. That familiar ringing in his ears never gets any easier. The only thing he manages to get out is the word “Okay.” There’s no point in pretending like he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. 

“I guess I just want to know why,” Kate says softly, staring at the glass of water on the table in front of her. “That’s what everyone wants to know, right?”

Cliff doesn’t know where to look and settles on _anywhere but at Kate._ “I don’t know,” he says, because it’s easier than explaining. “I just… I just did.”

“Are you going to try again?” Kate asks, even quieter this time. She carefully taps her fingernails against the table. Nervous habit. She doesn’t want to do what she knows lots of people do. She doesn’t want to make this all about her. But she also doesn’t know how she’ll possibly be able to get across to Cliff that she—and Dorothy too, probably—can’t _take_ seeing him like that again. How much it hurt.

Cliff opens his mouth to say _yes_ before closing it. He’s not with Niles anymore. There’s nothing to escape from. So maybe he should say that _no, I’m not going to try again,_ but what if that’s a lie? He’s not with the team anymore, and they clearly don’t care enough about him to come looking for him. Even Rita and Larry, the first of his people, haven’t shown up. If he doesn’t have the team, what’s he supposed to be hanging on for? He has Kate and Dorothy now, but…

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t think—I mean, it’s not like—it’s just hard. I don’t know how to be this person. I don’t know how to be any of this.” He gestures to himself even though it makes his ribs and collarbone ache. He doesn’t know if he can explain it in a way she’ll understand. “For so long, everything was tangled up with him, Caulder, and—we never really got away from him. He was always there, just at the very edges. Everything that I was, everything that made me _me,_ was something he’d given, even when it wasn’t entirely his fault, and I—”

“And now you don’t know who you are,” Kate finishes. Her voice cracks a little at the end.

Cliff swallows past the knot in his throat. “...Yeah,” he says hoarsely. “I don’t know who I am. I don’t even know _what_ I am.”

Retconn cooked him up out of fanfiction and set him down after winding him up like a toy soldier. This isn’t even his body, really, is it? His body—or the body of the _original_ Cliff Steele, the _real_ Cliff Steele—doesn’t want him. Either of them. Even if it wasn’t his body or his memory, he can still feel it pressing down on him, weight the only sensation his body could really register, as it asked him if it bothered him that even dead, he was still more human than Cliff would ever manage to be. What he has now is basically just a costume.

He digs his blunt nails into the back of his hand and tries to breathe. Tries to do _anything_ but think about how much he wishes this body that doesn’t belong to him, that’s too good for him with its real emotions and real senses and real skin and real parts, ended up burning at the bottom of that damn ravine. But he does. He really, really does. It’s the only way to be fucking rid of himself now that there’s no cosmic entities he can throw himself at.

Oh. Maybe he shouldn’t have said that he didn’t know if he would try again.

Kate reaches across the table to carefully take his hands. She’s so _soft._ She looks so fragile in the weird lighting with her eyes filled with unshed tears and—he can’t let her do this. He can’t let her drag herself (and, god forbid, Dorothy) down with him. He just can’t. 

But even if it’s selfish to want her to stay, he can’t bring himself to tell her to leave, because _god_ he missed her. More than almost anything. Cliff loved Larry and Rita and Josh and maybe if things hadn’t gone bad he could’ve loved Jane and the rest of them and he can’t say that he loved—loves—Kate _more_ because that isn’t fair and it’s not true, but he loved her… differently. Even when it felt like Josh wasn’t one of them, just a normal man cursed with powers, he’d still dragged him back in. Kate hadn’t needed to be dragged. Despite how normal as she was, she’d slipped right into their unit and brought them closer.

“Are you safe right now?” Kate asks, squeezing his fingers. She’s worried for him. God, he wishes she weren’t. She never deserved all this bullshit getting dumped on her.

“I don’t know,” Cliff says again. Even his _voice_ doesn’t belong to him. It had been his voice when he was a robot, but it had been distorted and it echoed when it came out and it always sounded harsher than he wanted it to. Now it just sounds flat and dead and off. “I’m sorry.”

Kate draws back a little but doesn’t let go of his hands as she shakes her head. “Jesus, Cliff. You don’t have to be sorry. It’s okay.”

That’s about when the dam inside him breaks, and Kate stands up to hug him from behind when he starts crying.

* * *

Dorothy and Cliff are home alone three days later when someone starts pounding on the door.

Kate’s out getting groceries, but she already used Niles’ money to pay for the rent due this month when they first got the place so it can’t be the landlord angry about a late payment or something. Cliff’s pretty sure it’s only been about a week, he can’t possibly want more. So he waves Dorothy to stay where she is and maneuvers toward the door carefully on his crutches because he knows Dorothy will scold him if she sees him walking without them. Even if it’s just down the hallway.

Best case scenario it’s someone who has the wrong apartment and is from the sound of things angry at those people, not at them. Worst case scenario it’s… well, almost anybody else. Mr. Nobody’s still off doing his show, apparently Dorothy’s found it a few times even though it’s always gone when she runs to tell Cliff and Kate about it, and he and his little gang probably wouldn’t knock anyways, but they’re not exactly the only ones who could have found the apartment. There’s not even the most dangerous ones, because it could be _Niles_ outside that door, looking to take back what’s his, and fuck, if he’s out there, Cliff doesn’t know what he’ll do.

The apartment door doesn’t have a peephole, so Cliff just has to brace himself for the very worst and pray that Dorothy will be able to get out if it’s trouble as he pulls the door open.

He barely even has time to get a look at the cluster of people at the door before two sets of arms start smothering him in a hug so tight it makes his lungs burn.

He jerks in place without meaning to before he feels the faux fur on Larry’s coat tickling his nose and hears Rita gasping “We were so worried about you!” into his ear and automatically hugs back, clinging onto them like they’ll disappear if he lets go and closing his eyes so he can feel them around him and pretend that everything is going to be okay. His crutches clatter when they hit the ground and if he were looking he’d know that Casey was inspecting them for breakage from her spot. 

A massive hand pats his head, and Cliff doesn’t have to open his eyes to know that Flex is standing there trying to be comforting. He reluctantly lets go of Larry and Rita and takes a step back, trying to do a headcount. 

As it turns out, it’s pretty much everybody, though it looks like they’re missing Lucius and Danny is probably parked outside. But something’s off. Casey’s got a bandage wrapped around her upper arm, he can see it through the tear in her suit. Jane—he thinks it’s Jane, at least—looks like she hasn’t slept in a week, though she gives him a tired smile when he looks at her. Flex looks pretty much exactly the same, which isn’t a surprise. So does Rita, which kind of is. But Larry, on the other hand… he’s glowing. Literally. And Keeg is _there,_ outside of his body, half perched on his shoulder like an oddly shaped bird, hir head tilted to the side as ze inspects the mezuzah they got permission to put on the doorframe of the apartment. 

“Who was at the door?” Dorothy calls loudly, and Jane straightens as her eyes widen. Of course, she and Flex are the ones here who actually _know_ Dorothy (Keeg might too, since Cliff’s pretty sure ze remembers being Rebis, but who the hell knows what happens in hir head). Dorothy creeps down the hall and pushes her head up under Cliff’s arm so she can see everyone. She beams when her gaze lands on Jane and Flex. “Mr. Flex! Look, Cliff, it’s Jane and Flex!” She inspects Larry for a second and frowns as her shoulders droop. “But he’s… he’s not Rebis…”

“I know,” Cliff says. He awkwardly steps back. What’s he supposed to say? Why are they here _now?_ He’s happy to see them, or at least he thinks he is, and it’s nice to know that they’re all alive and that Larry and Rita didn’t die without him there to protect them, but what’s he supposed to do? Kate would know, but Kate’s not _here._ “Um. You can all come in if you want. Dorothy, this is Casey, and you know Jane and Flex, and this is Larry and Rita. And Keeg.”

“Nice to meet you!” Dorothy chirps as they all file into the house. She’s rubbing her fingers on the sleeves of her opposite arms like she does when she’s nervous. It is a _lot_ of people, even if she knows some of them. “Um, Kate should be back soon, she’s just out getting groceries…” She trails off again, looking at Cliff uncertainly.

“Is this where you’ve been the whole time?” Casey asks, inspecting the walls like she’s afraid they’re going to collapse. “When we got back and Danny couldn’t find you, we all thought that something bad had happened, we had to ask Sam when we dropped off—”

“Back?” Cliff interrupts. His stomach feels funny and it feels like he’s breathing through cloth. He braces himself against the wall, crutches still on the floor. Dorothy frowns and takes his hand. It’s just like it was before. Sometimes, when safe adults like Josh and Cliff got scared, it helped to hold their hand. Dorothy wasn’t sure if it really did anything to solve the problem or not, but they seemed to at least like it. “Back from where?”

“Space,” Larry says. He sounds very, very tired. Most people probably don’t so unendingly exhausted when they talk about going on a space adventure. He also seems to be unaware of the dawning realization slowly seeping into Cliff’s brain.

“How long were you gone?” He asks. Dorothy squeezes his hand as Keeg makes a small humming sound and inspects her. Maybe ze does remember her after all. Dorothy, at least, hopes that the little black and green-white-yellow thing on Larry’s shoulder knows who she is, because it certainly _looks_ like the thing that lived inside of Rebis. Or was Rebis. Or something. Rebis was really confusing. 

“I dunno,” Casey answers truthfully. She scrunches up her nose. “Time is weird in space, dude. It was basically right after I dropped you off at Breezy Day. We went to a couple different planets. Flex had to pretend to be a family lawyer.”

It feels like a weight has been taken off Cliff’s shoulders. Sure, they probably still don’t want him, god knows why they came back to Earth to find him in the first place, but… they were gone. They didn’t come to the hospital because they were _gone_ and they _didn’t know._ Fuck, even if they most likely wouldn’t have shown up even if they had been on Earth the whole time, at least now he can pretend that they would’ve.

“What happened while we were gone?” Jane asks, ever the leader even if Cliff is sure he’s not a part of her team anymore. Her eyes are on the cast on his leg and on the discarded sling laying on the kitchen table that he refuses to use no matter how much Kate tells him he needs to or his collarbone won’t heal properly. “Did someone attack you?”

“He was in a car accident,” Dorothy says solemnly before Cliff can answer. Which is good, because he’s not sure if he’ll be able to stop himself from telling the whole truth instead of just the sanitized version. It’s not like Larry and Rita would think anything of it if he _did_ tell them what really happened. They’ve had to deal with his shit before. “That’s when me and Kate went and found him at the hospital.”

Rita finally speaks up. She’s holding Larry’s hand, Cliff notices. Tightly. His own fingers twitch a little. He used to fit with them like that. He’s not an idiot, he knows he can’t be a part of their little family unit anymore now that he’s just a normal human, but he misses being one of them. “Who’s Kate?”

“Kate’s _Kate,”_ Dorothy says, confused. “She’s just _Kate.”_

As if on cue, the front door opens again and Kate shouts out a quick “I’m home!” as she pushes through, two paper bags of groceries in her arms. She stops and blinks at the five new bodies and one alien crowded in their tiny kitchen. Cliff expects her to relax once she notices that none of them could possibly be civilians, but instead she just looks even more on edge, eyes surprisingly fixed on Larry over anybody else. “Uh…”

“Kate, this is the… team. This is the Doom Patrol, I guess,” Cliff answers the question she hasn’t asked. She still hasn’t taken her eyes off of Larry. “Rita, Flex, Casey, Jane, and Larry and Keeg, this is Kate.”

“So your name’s Larry?” Kate tilts her head as she finally sets down her grocery bags on the counter. Sure, she remembers them looking a little different, same with that sharp thing on their shoulder, Keeg, but… it has to be them, doesn’t it? Who _else_ could it be?

Larry shifts a little, and Cliff knows from years of experience that he’s confused behind those bandages. “Er, do I know you?”

“Aren’t you the one who…” Kate wiggles her fingers and the edge of Larry’s jacket starts liquifying before she stops and it solidifies again, though that part of the sleeve has clearly become a material that is definitely not fabric.

Larry opens his mouth to tell her that he’s pretty sure she’s got the wrong person, but Keeg speaks up first. “I remember you,” ze buzzes, bobbing hir head in recognition. “From when we were Rebis. You were the woman from the street who came to ask if we needed help, the one we gifted in exchange.”

Kate inclines her head before finally looking at everyone else, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Cliff is currently having an internal crisis over the idea of Keeg-as-Rebis being the one to give Kate her powers. How the fuck did he not know that before? He’d felt the moment she got them when they were together as one, the singing rush of pleasure that seeped into his plating and still made him blush, but he’d never thought to connect it to Rebis and what xe could do. What the hell?

“Why are you all here now?” Cliff snaps back to reality when he registers how cold Kate’s voice sounds. She’s not just looking at Larry, now. Her eyes are on _everyone._ “Where were you before?”

“They were in space,” Cliff says before anybody else can answer. Maybe they still don’t really care about him now that he’s different, but there’s _something_ singing inside his circuits now that he knows they didn’t ignore him on purpose. It doesn’t matter if they would have regardless. At least Kate does relax a little. “They didn’t get back ‘til just now.”

“We brought you space souvenir,” Casey says brightly. “It’s in Danny. We would have brought more if we knew your friends would be here.” She’s forcing her smile. She can probably tell that him just “getting into a car accident” isn’t the full story. Hell, Flex seems to be the only one actually buying it. Maybe Keeg and Larry are too. It’s kind of hard to tell. Especially since Dorothy grabbed onto his arm with an excited squeal the second Casey mentioned Danny. “I can run out and get ‘em if you want.”

“I can wait.” Cliff kind of wants to go back to hugging people. He wants to close his eyes and stop feeling anything except the weight of the people he loved around him. For a long time, pressures like that had been the only way he even _could_ feel love. His first robot body had the ability to register weights, and sometimes it had just been him and Rita and Larry crowded into a room and trying not to tear their skin off, all pressed against each other and fumbling to hang on, Rita big enough to hug both of them close. Then, Cliff would have given anything to be able to feel something real again. Now… 

“No, no, you were in an accident,” Flex says, motioning for him to sit down, “and it’s already getting pretty late. We should go. I’ll grab the gift and bring it in and then we’ll head out. You should come stop by Danny tomorrow, though! I’m sure he’ll want to see that you’re okay for himself and meet Kate.”

“I can’t wait to see Danny!” Dorothy beams. “He’s the _best ever,_ except for Josh and Cliff and Kate.” Her smile fades a little and Cliff winces. He knows she misses Josh. He does too, though probably not how Dorothy’s expecting. Their thing may have been brief and strange and not quite what Cliff had sometimes wanted it to be, but it had been theirs, and that was something. He wants to look for him, he really does, especially since there are memories in his head of Josh being alive, and he knows he must be unless Niles somehow tracked him down, _and_ he’s going to tell Dorothy that he’s probably okay at some point like he planned, but he’s honestly not sure if Josh would even _want_ to be looked for. Even to see Dorothy again.

“Come over tomorrow, then,” Jane reasons, glancing at Flex. “He’s going to be so happy to see you two. Especially you, Dorothy. No offense, Cliff.” She crosses the room to hug him before he has a chance to react, some of that soothing aura she seems to carry with her now leaching into him and making his broken bones hurt less. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

They file out awkwardly, with Keeg giving one last quick head bob accompanied by a small electrical chirping sound in Kate’s direction. Cliff reminds himself to ask her about that. Later. After he’s processed some things. He’s still processing even after Flex comes back with Casey’s souvenir, which turns out to be a little box with a hologram inside that shows the landscape of any planet he types in.

Things like the fact that they _didn’t abandon him._ Maybe they will now. They _definitely_ will now. But it’ll hurt less because it won’t be the same. Space. They were in _space._ It’s just the kind of thing that’s stupid and unrealistic enough to be completely true. They were in _space,_ they didn’t _know,_ they didn’t really leave him behind, and Cliff can’t stop himself from smiling.

Maybe his family still cares about him after all. At least a little bit.

* * *

“Do you think they’re telling the truth?” Kate’s sitting cross-legged on the bed—their bed—with her shoulders hunched in, practically swimming in one of Cliff’s giant shirts. “I mean, they obviously went to space, which is cool and all, but do you think they really didn’t know what happened?”

Cliff flinches a little. He knows Kate means well. But he also knows they must be telling the truth. They just have to be. They’re his family, just like she is, and he’d trust them with his life. He _has_ trusted them with his life, that’s kind of the whole point of their dynamic, even with Casey, new as she is. Thinking about his family abandoning him is one thing, but thinking about them lying to him is another. Niles lied to him all the time. His family are the only ones he could ever trust to tell him the truth. “Please don’t.”

Kate clearly recognizes the line she’s approaching, because she winces and nods. “Okay. I know they love you, Cliff. Of course they do. And I’m really, really glad they didn’t leave you behind on purpose. I still think they should have been here, and it’s a little convenient that they weren’t, but they love you and they want to be there for you, and I think that outweighs anything else,” she says, choosing her words _extremely_ carefully. “And _because_ they love you, I think they deserve to know what really happened.”

Kate has her speech all prepared. She’s ready to tell him that she knows it’s completely his choice which people he wants to give the full story to, and she knows this is a really delicate process, and a really hard thing to talk about, and she isn’t trying to pressure him, but she really does think that it would be for the best if he told them the truth. She’s ready for him to argue and prepared to tell him that while she respects his decision and won’t pressure him she’s not going to budge in her stance.

Instead, he just shrugs (and then grimaces, because that made his collarbone start burning again. He’s managed to start powering through the pain to change himself, which is nice, because it means he’s not insisting to Kate that it’s okay he’s wearing the same clothes for days on end, but the pain in small movements still catches him off guard sometimes). “Alright.”

It’s not like it’s going to be news. To Larry and Rita, at least. There was a good few years where the only thing they could count on, period, was how much the three of them just wanted to end it all. Even then, Larry and Rita had just taken unnecessary, self-destructive risks, with their fingers crossed that something would happen and they would at least go out well. Cliff had been the one who acted with real intent. What was it he’d once said? _The only things keeping me from chucking myself into a smelter are right here in this room?_

Honestly, he still feels that way. It’s just that now they aren’t forced together. Kate and Dorothy are here, and Larry and Rita are off in Dannyland somewhere (as much as he loves them, Cliff’s always felt like he was more of a burden on Jane and the rest of the Underground than anything. They weren’t a reason to keep going as much as someone he needed to keep alive for their own sakes), hopefully safe. They’re still the only things he has worth sticking around for, and back then Kate and Dorothy hadn’t even been around to factor into the equation.

Kate blinks, taken aback. “...Okay.” She pats the bed and Cliff scoots over to sit down next to her. She takes his hand. There’s a small creaking sound by the doorway, but he ignores it. It’s an apartment, and not exactly a new one. It’s bound to be a little rickety. “Do you want my help? Or do you want to do it alone?”

“I think it’d be better if I did it by myself,” Cliff says. His voice cracks a bit and he clears his throat. “I mean—I can do it by myself, but I’d like it if you were there. I’d really like that. I know I can do it, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay afterward. You… you have to make sure I do. Is that okay?”

“God, Cliff, of course it is.” She briefly rests her head on his uninjured shoulder. “I’m here for you all the way, alright? I promise I’m going to be there for you. I just don’t want to see you hurt yourself again. As long as it’s helpful, and as long as I _can_ be here, I’ll always be there for you.”

Outside the door, Dorothy carefully backs away down the hallway and heads toward her room, trying not to step on the creaky board again. She squeezes the bottom of her shirt anxiously and curls up in a little ball on her bed, rocking a little with her nose in between her knees as she tries to breathe.

She _knew_ they weren’t telling the truth about the car accident. She’d just _known_ it. Well, she hadn’t the whole time, but she’d gotten suspicious when something about the whole story clearly felt off to the new Doom Patrol. She wasn’t a baby, she could handle the truth about what had happened, but… now that she has enough pieces to glue it together, she wishes she didn’t. 

_I just don’t want to see you hurt yourself again._

Dorothy had never known anybody else who had tried to do something like that. Or at least she didn’t _know_ that she did (she remains thankfully unaware of the point that Jane had been driven to in the so-called “real world”), except now for Cliff. It makes something inside of her crinkle up into a little ball that tastes like metal. She doesn’t even want to be mad that they didn’t tell her. She _is,_ for some reason she’s upset about it even though she knows she shouldn’t be. _(But they said she was the leader, and they said that they loved her, and she doesn’t think the people who love you are supposed to lie to you…)_

She already said goodnight to them, so all Dorothy can do is sit in the dark and sniffle into her pyjamas and wonder why they didn’t trust her enough to tell her the truth and try to come up with something she’s supposed to do to fix things.

* * *

The sun shining down on Dannyland is warm. Lotion is napping at the top of the King of the Bees ride, lazily stretched out with his jacket folded up under his head as a makeshift pillow. Lucius is currently lost somewhere in the Parking Lot of Infinite Emptiness and refusing to ask for help from any of his patron deities, supposedly to “test his abilities,” much to the chagrin of Sam, who is lost with him. Flex is hanging out somewhere in Cabanaland, trying to convince the citizens to stop worshipping him as a god and inadvertently making things worse by performing accidental acts of muscle magic. 

And at the entrance of Danny the Main Street, Cliff, Kate, and Dorothy stand, looking around at everything (and especially at the big _WELCOME!_ sign Danny has strung across his street—the dot in the exclamation point is heart-shaped, of course), Dorothy and Kate with awe in their eyes, and Cliff too tired to focus on anything but the way the two of them are holding his hands on either side.

“You came!” Casey calls from somewhere to the right, and she rushes up with Fugg in her arms. Fugg chirps happily and reaches for Cliff. The second Dorothy sees him—it? Who the hell knows—her eyes go as wide as saucers and she makes a soft little shrieking noise. Fugg immediately switches to reaching for her instead, and Dorothy lets go of Cliff’s hand to hug the little alien tightly to her chest. Yeah, they probably should have predicted that. “Almost everyone’s over in the DMV. C’mon.”

“The DMV?” Kate echoes, clearly confused, but she steps back and lets go of Cliff’s hand so he can follow Casey on his crutches. “You have a DMV… here?” Out of the corner of his eye, Cliff can see her glancing at the massive pink castle at the end of the lane.

“The DMV is like our HQ,” Casey explains, standing just close enough to Cliff that he knows she’s telling him he can lean on her if he needs to but far enough that she’s not going to accidentally get her non-prosthetic foot crushed under one of his crutches. “It’s also a working DMV for Dannyland citizens, but we have all the back rooms to ourselves.”

The walk to the DMV is a relatively short one, probably because Danny’s _making_ it a short one. Kate makes small talk with Casey, and Dorothy, still holding Fugg, happily joins in when Casey mentions that even though she wasn’t born in a _traditional_ way, Danny is her dad. Cliff hadn’t even realized that the two of them were that close. But Danny must have been one of the ones to interact with Dorothy the most one-on-one before she left. He feels bad about that.

When they get to the door, Dorothy pauses and squeezes Fugg a little tighter. “I can stay out here. I want to talk to Danny. I won’t go far. Promise.”

“You can go anywhere you like,” Casey encourages. “Danny will always know where you are, so as long as you stay somewhere in Dannyland, you’ll never be lost unless you want to be. And the food is free, but I’m guessing you already knew that since you’ve met him before.” She offers her fist for Dorothy to bump, and after a moment’s hesitation she accepts with a wide smile.

Kate and Cliff try not to let their relief show on their faces as Dorothy watches the three of them go inside. Dorothy deserves to know what happened, she’s a wonderful kid and they both adore her, but they’ll take any excuse to put it off longer. That’ll be an even more difficult conversation for Cliff in particular than anything waiting for him inside the DMV.

“Danny? What would you do if someone you really, really loved did something bad and hurt themselves? And then they didn’t tell you about it?” Dorothy asks as soon as the doors close behind them. Fugg waves his little arms and Dorothy finally sets him down, and he grabs onto her pant leg to pull her over to sit in the shade as graffiti formerly reading _“DANNYLAND FUXS”_ and _“RHEA WAS HERE”_ changes. She really hopes that nobody in the DMV can hear her.

 _I’d try to help them, of course,_ Danny says. _I think that’s very important. I’d invite them to stay here with me so I could keep them safe. I’ve had to do it a few times before. The lattie is so big for a reason, since most folks don’t want to live in the stores. And they don’t like to tell people about it, most of the time. Sometimes it’s because they want to protect someone_ —and here, one of Danny’s banners gently drifts down to rest over Dorothy’s shoulders like a shawl— _and sometimes it’s because they want to protect themselves. Did that help any, dear?_

“I don’t know,” Dorothy admits, patting Fugg’s ears. She wonders what Josh would say if she asked him. It would probably be the same thing, since Danny is so good and Josh is—was—good, too. “Is it bad to be mad that they didn’t tell you? Does that make you a bad person?”

 _Of course not,_ Danny comforts. _It’s only natural. That’s what being human is, Dorothy. You can be upset about something and feel like you shouldn’t be._ The banner wraps a little tighter. Danny may not be able to speak through a radio anymore, at least not with his own voice, but he still has enough power to move his extensions even when they’re disconnected. _I’m always here if you want to talk, sweetheart._

Dorothy nods and keeps petting Fugg’s ears. They’re very soft, and the little feathery tufts on the top of his head feel strange in a good way against her skin. It reminds her of when she was a kid and she needed to have her stuffed crow with her whenever she tried to go to sleep, and how when her mom had tried to throw it away she’d snuck it out of the trash and hidden it in her room so it would always be with her.

Even if she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to be acting, she knew that she still loved Cliff and Kate. That had to be enough, didn’t it?

Meanwhile, inside the DMV, Cliff is once again swarmed by a hug from Rita and Larry. They’re a bit more careful this time, now that they know he has still-healing broken bones, but he holds on just as tightly as he did the first time around.

“It wasn’t _just_ a car crash, right?” Casey says anxiously as soon as they step back. She’s chewing her lower lip and looking back and forth between Kate and Cliff. “I mean, you got attacked, right? Or something like that?”

“Was it Niles?” Rita asks softly. Her and Larry were the only ones who really _got_ it. What it had been like to live with him. Nearly everyone who had been a part of the Doom Patrol understood some of it, almost all of them had been manipulated by him, but Rita and Larry had been there first, when it had been the three of them under Niles and simultaneously against the whole damn world.

“It wasn’t Niles.” Cliff shifts and looks at Kate. She nods encouragingly.

“So it was Mr. Nobody, then? Or… Retconn?” Casey furrows her eyebrows. “I mean, I guess I thought they all exploded or something, but are they still around?”

“It wasn’t anybody.” Cliff swallows and Kate steps closer so she can squeeze his hand. “Nobody attacked me, or tried to hurt me. It wasn’t anybody. I did it.” Maybe he can’t do this after all. It was much easier to think about than it is to actually _do._ “I crashed.”

“So it _was_ just an accident?” Jane says, clearly confused.

“No,” Cliff forces out. “It wasn’t. I—what I’m trying to say is—I drove the damn car off a cliff, okay? On purpose. I was trying to—” The words get stuck and he can’t quite get them out. He’d rather be anywhere but here. With Rita and Larry he hadn’t needed to tell them because they’d been there. It hadn’t been like _this_ before. He squeezes Kate’s hand so tightly his knuckles turn white. “I was trying to fucking kill myself, okay?”

There’s a long silence where Casey, Jane, Rita, and Larry all just stare at him. Keeg, from hir perch on Larry’s head, makes a discomforted _bzzt-bzzt_ sound. That… hadn’t been what Cliff was expecting. Honestly, he’d been anticipating an _“oh, is that all?”_ or something. Not that he thought any of them would be callous, just… this was supposed to be something normal for him. And Jane, at least, is way more surprised than he expected her to be.

(Cliff doesn’t realize that it’s because there is no version of him that does things like that inside her head. She loves him—not like that. It’s never been like that. Even Liza and Penny have rejected that version of him and come to terms with the fact that the only reason they _ever_ had a crush on him (as childish as that sounds) is because he was the first man to ever be genuinely kind to them. The first man who _didn’t_ immediately try to hurt any of them from the jump—and he was the one who pulled _her_ back from those things. The one who had been there to save her from the “real world.”

 _That’s_ who he’s supposed to be. Even if thinking back on it, there had surely been signs, and he’d been in the same facility as her when they’d met, hadn’t he? Things like that which she’d either not noticed at the time or purposefully disregarded. And now… he finally had what he wanted. His _real_ human body back. This was all _wrong._ Things weren’t supposed to be like this.)

Casey is the first to speak up. _“Why?”_

“I don’t know,” Cliff says. His voice is shaking and all he can do is look at the floor. What can he even say? _Seeing my mom again and hearing her talk to me just like she did when I was a kid reminded me of how I let everyone down? Retconn making me out of fanfiction makes me feel like I’m going to collapse at any second? I feel useless now and I think my body hates me? Everyone I try to love dies and the least I can do is be there for them? I don’t want Niles to find me again? I miss being empty and numb and that makes me want to tear my own heart out?_ “Everything. I guess. I don’t know. I just did.”

“Someone found him and called an ambulance,” Kate says quietly. Cliff looks at her. He knows this part of the story, but it still makes something inside him ache. “I was already trying to find him, I’d picked up Dorothy and I was just trying to go _anywhere_ familiar to see if anybody was still there. We were on the Doom Patrol together, I know some of you met Dorothy but not me, and I… I care about Cliff a lot. I was trying to find him, and I heard about the crash on the news, and then things just… spiraled.”

Larry shifts and shakes his head, causing Keeg to have to resettle hirself. “I should have felt it,” he murmurs. “I should have… have you tried again?” There’ll be time to wonder whether or not he’d been feeding on him when he needed negative energy like a source needs a sink later. He looks at Kate. “Has he tried again?”

“No,” Cliff says. Kate shakes her head at the same time. “I haven’t, thanks. Look, this isn’t a big deal—”

“Of course it’s a big deal.” Jane crosses her arms. “You tried to kill yourself. Maybe you should stay on Danny for awhile, I’m sure he has room, and it’ll probably be safer for you to recover here than anywhere else. Kate, you and Dorothy could stay here too, if you wanted.” She’s taking on the team leader tone. It makes Cliff want to sprint out of the room, which definitely isn’t Jane’s fault—it’s a leftover instinct from when Niles controlled absolutely everything about his life—but that doesn’t make the sick feeling in his stomach go away.

“I don’t want to leave,” he protests. “I—I like where I am now. With Kate and Dorothy.” It’s the truth. It reminds him of the rare good days when they’d been together with Dorothy and George and Marion and Niles hadn’t been able to ruin _everything_ about his life. When things had been as safe as they ever could be. Being around them now makes his chest hurt in a good way. “And you don’t need a washed-up ex-member of your team taking up space in your—”

He gets cut off again, this time by Casey. “You’re not a washed-up ex- _anything,”_ she argues. “You’re Cliff Steele! Even if you don’t want to be on the team anymore, which is fine, you can do whatever you want, you’re still our—our friend! Retconn jacking you up doesn’t change that!”

Cliff’s throat feels tight. “...Oh,” he gets out. “Okay.”

“Did you think we left you behind?” Rita looks like she’s about to start crying. “When we were in space, did you think we didn’t come find you on purpose?” Apparently Cliff’s expression is enough to give away the answer, because he’s suddenly pulled into _another_ hug from her. Of course, Larry joins five seconds later, Keeg moving to Jane’s shoulder at the sudden interruption and Kate letting go of Cliff’s hand to make room.

“You’re not getting rid of us that easily,” Larry says firmly. Which makes Cliff start crying. Again. He can’t even muster up the energy to be annoyed about that. He’s built up a lot of tears over the decades Niles spent building and rebuilding him and pushing him away from humanity. At least now he has the chance to actually shed them. 

“You don’t have to stay on Danny if you don’t want to,” Rita says, still hugging him. “But at least let us visit you sometimes. To make sure you’re okay. Please?”

“‘Course you can come over.” He fumbles blindly for Kate and she steps closer so he can latch onto her arm even if there’s really no wiggle room to do that. “I really do want to stay where I am. I… I think it’s better for me to be there. But I’ll always want to see you.” He looks at Jane and Casey. _“All_ of you. I just thought I’d be…” A nuisance. “Useless. Now that I’m in this body.”

Honestly, Cliff should have predicted that Casey would start hugging him the second he said that, but he was _not_ anticipating that Jane would join in too. “You don’t have to be useful to whoever the hell the Doom Patrol is supposed to be. That doesn’t matter. You’re still _you._ And we love you.”

“Alright.” It’s all he really can say. Kate moves to join in on the hug, even though she hardly knows most of the people involved in it, which he really appreciates. He doesn’t deserve to have this many people who love him, he knows that, but he’s selfish enough to pretend that he does. Just long enough to really enjoy it.

He lets Kate do most of the talking after that. She gives Jane her number and says that she’s welcome any time, as long as nobody wrecks the apartment, because that would absolutely get them evicted and Sam didn’t really have any other suggestions outside of moving to Danny (at the time saying “whenever he comes back,” though that obviously didn’t apply now), which Cliff still really didn’t want to do. He wasn’t even sure why. It was just kind of nice to be away even if he missed everybody when they weren’t right there in the same house/theme park as him or whatever the hell.

They leave the DMV afterward, because Kate accepted Casey’s offer for a tour, and Dorothy comes running up to them, Fugg toddling along behind her. There’s something sad in her smile but it doesn’t stop her from quickly giving him a hug before excitedly telling Kate that she’s been telling Danny everything about her and that he was really happy when she told him that she was really good at computers before he can never quite nail down the right way to make arcade games. 

The sun is starting to dip below the tallest tower of Danny’s Lattie, and Cliff watches Dorothy skip in circles around their little group with a fond smile. He really missed her. He really missed _this,_ the feeling of safety and comfort that comes from being surrounded by friends. By the people who _really_ loved him. He may not want to live there for the time being—and the reasons why are damn near impossible to explain, and they start and end with Kate and Dorothy, even though he knows Jane was serious when she said that they could live in Dannyland too—but that doesn’t mean he feels unsafe inside the walls of the park.

It’s silly to pretend like all he has to do is remember that he has people that love him and aren’t going to hurt him and that’ll fix everything. He knows from experience it won’t. But that’s okay. Because _god,_ he loves them too, and even if that's not enough either, he can hold his breath and count backwards from ten and rely on them to remind him about the things that might make it all be alright again. 

Hell, that might even be what love _is._ And if that’s true, even if he won’t be okay forever, because there are a thousand problems that could show up at any moment from Niles to Mr. Nobody to the Builders, at least he can feel safe right now.

And sometimes that’s enough. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm @augustheart on tumblr, and I really miss Kate and Dorothy and am pretty unsatisfied with how Weight of the Worlds has gone, to say the least.


End file.
